1. Field of the Invention
The field of the invention is data processing, or, more specifically, methods, apparatus, and products for tracking errors in a computing system.
2. Description of Related Art
The development of the EDVAC computer system of 1948 is often cited as the beginning of the computer era. Since that time, computer systems have evolved into extremely complicated devices. Today's computers are much more sophisticated than early systems such as the EDVAC. Computer systems typically include a combination of hardware and software components, application programs, operating systems, processors, buses, memory, input/output devices, and so on. As advances in semiconductor processing and computer architecture push the performance of the computer higher and higher, more sophisticated computer software has evolved to take advantage of the higher performance of the hardware, resulting in computer systems today that are much more powerful than just a few years ago.
Modern computing systems may generate errors that are used to analyze and correct the operation of the computing system. Error thresholding is common practice for handling hardware error interrupts in firmware. A threshold is composed of a time-interval in which an error-limit must be reached in order for the computing system to take some repair action. Typically, a computing system can capture a timestamp of the first error and count errors until the error-limit is reached or an error occurs outside the current time-interval thus defining a new starting timestamp and beginning a new interval. This algorithm is efficient for space utilization but is neither an exact representation of errors-per-interval nor does it provide any mechanism for correlating errors to user actions.